Monday, 29 May 2017

Feedback is the process where an action has an effect, which
in turn changes the original action. Either it magnifies it ­– reinforcing
feedback; or it corrects it – balancing feedback. In the last blog I showed how
such feedback loops affect the growth and decline of the church, where changes
in the size of people groups within the church feed back on its growth and
decline processes [1].

For example, consider the enthusiasts – those responsible
for recruiting new people to church. The more enthusiasts, the more converts
recruited, thus even more enthusiasts – reinforcing feedback with accelerating
growth. This is an example of first order feedback – that is, it only
involves one stock – the enthusiasts in this case. A stock is an
accumulation – taking time to increase or deplete. Populations are stocks, and
first order feedback means they directly change themselves: short-term changes,
those up to a couple of generations. Church growth and decline is mainly
governed by such first order feedback [2].

Second Order Feedback

Second order feedback involves two stocks. A change
in a population stock, like church, affects another
stock, before it comes back to change the original population through
accumulation or depletion. The “peril” of this second order effect is that the
feedback process has inertia, meaning that there is a delay in the
feedback process, either magnifying, or regulating, the population changes.
This feedback introduces long-term changes that are very hard to control [3]. The
following example from church dynamics will illustrate this.

Institutionalism

When a new church or movement starts, it is normally quite
small, free of centralised control, and spiritually lively. They are often in
the hands of people where growth and spiritual purity are to the fore, and they
grow rapidly, generating many people who operate in the same unfettered manner.

However, as church gets larger, there is a growing need for
organisational structures to regulate church life, train ministers, construct
and maintain buildings and finance salaries. These are some of the traits of
institutionalism. The bigger the church, the more institutionalised it becomes.
It leads to an institutionalised mindset, where maintenance and acceptance by
society become a higher priority than growth and spiritual issues.

Institutionalism is a stock, figure 1. It takes time to
accumulate, and is hard to remove once it is there. Institutional inertia is
well known. Second order feedback, balancing loop B3, happens because institutionalism undermines the conversion
process, the first order reinforcing loop R1.
The institutional shift moves the bulk of the church from mission to
maintenance, thus conversions, loop R1,
fall to a value under the church leaving rate and deaths, loop B2. Thus church
declines. But the second order effect means that by the time the decline
becomes really noticeable, the church is not able to act fast enough to remove
the institutionalism to increase conversion, thus decline continues [4].

Figure 1: Institutional Model of Church Growth

Overshoot and Decline

Figure 2 shows the effects of this second order institutional
loop on church numbers. There is a long period of rapid growth, helped by the
delays in the loop as institutionalism takes so long to build. This is the good
side of second order feedback – it takes ages to have an impact. The bad side –
the peril of the second order feedback – is that by the time institutionalism has
turned growth to decline it has become too large to deal with. There is some
natural depletion of institutionalism, (loop B4, figure 1), but it requires deliberate action by the church to
dismantle it. Unfortunately, institutionalism is also a mindset, and that
action is too little, too late, and the church heads for extinction, figure 2.

Figure 2: Overshoot and Decline Behaviour of Church Growth and Institutionalism

The result is the institutional lifecycle of figure 2. This
is the current state of most of the older denominations in the UK and other
Western countries. The revivals of the 18th- 19th
centuries have transitioned to organisations with much wider concerns than just
saving souls. The timescale of this second order effect, about 300 years in
this case, is much longer than that of the revival growth dynamics.

Thus the current decline in church is not primarily due to
events happening now, or from the immediate past, but events of a hundred or
more years ago being naturally worked out.I have blogged before how the UK church reached its peak
around the 1870s, about 140 years after the commencement of revival [5].
Institutionalism was too high, stifling revival, spiritual life and doctrinal
orthodoxy. Decline followed, and 140 years further on again, the churches are
in the same declining phase, but much nearer the end.

A Way Forward?

When one church lifecycle is ending, there is more space for
another to start. The Methodist movement came out of the decline of a previous
church lifecycle that had started at the reformation and, with much political
turmoil, had run its course by the end of the 1600s. Methodism started as a
renewal movement in the Church of England in the 1730s, then eventually
separated in the late 1700s, allowing both to flourish, along with the other
denominations also caught up with the revival. Separation allowed Methodism to
free itself of the stock of institutionalism of the established church,
especially the parish system, thus breaking the effect of the second order
feedback loop – at least for the next 100 years before it developed its own
institutionalism.

Perhaps now is the time for those who have been part of the
evangelical and Charismatic renewal of the last 60 years to separate from the
declining denominations. Just tinkering with effects of second order feedback will
not turn decline into growth, instead denominations will continue to head to
extinction.The more radical
approach of separation is needed.

Such separation is not a recipe for division. The division
is already there as is seen in the fights between the biblically orthodox and
liberal wings of the older denominations. A separation now would allow both
camps to concentrate on what they see as their missions, rather than battles
for control of organisations that have run their course. Recently, Free Church
minister David Robertson has suggested this strategy for the Church of
Scotland, but it really applies to all existing institutional churches – those
that have been around for 150 years or more [6].

Some of the older denominations will no doubt wither away.
Others may indeed save themselves from that fate, once the internal dynamics
have changed. Hopefully, in the new separated churches, it would allow the
revival work that has been simmering away since the start of Pentecostalism to
flourish and result in many conversions. This is a controversial solution to
church decline, but the history of the church is full of such separation. This
year is the 500th anniversary of Luther and his objections to the
Catholic Church that led to a major parting of the ways [7]. The time may well
be right for another parting of the ways in the Christian denominations.

Sunday, 14 May 2017

Feedback in a system that changes over time is the mechanism
where an action results in an effect, which then in turn influences the
original action. The action literally “feeds back” on itself.

Reinforcing Feedback

For example, if a population grows through births, the more
in the population, the more people are born, thus even more are added to the
population and it grows faster. This is a reinforcing feedback loop; the result
is exponential growth, that is growth
that speeds up [1].

Sometimes church leaders think that churches grow the same
way. The larger the church becomes, the more people are added to the church,
thus the church grows even faster, figure 1. People may be added through births
and through conversion. The rectangle “Church” is called a stock. It is an
accumulation of people. The pipe “add to church” is called a flow and
represents the addition of people in a fixed period of time. Figure 1 is an
example of a system dynamics model.

Fig 1. Reinforcing
feedback (R) applied to church growth

It is true that the early phase of a church’s growth is
often exponential. However, with a bit more thought, not everyone in a church
is engaged in the process of adding people to the church. Some are inactive in
church altogether. Others may be active in church life but may have never
brought anyone new to church. Others may have invited new people in the past
but are no longer doing so. For many of the churches I have studied I have
estimated that at any one time less than 5% of church members are active in
adding people to their church.

Enthusiasts

As an alternative to the hypothesis in figure 1, I have
proposed an alternative feedback hypothesis where only a subset of the church
actively adds people to the church [2]. I call these people enthusiasts, after
the nickname given to the Methodists in the 18th century – people
who were very active in evangelism. Figure 2 expresses this hypothesis as a
reinforcing feedback loop

Fig 2. Reinforcing
feedback (R1) and enthusiasts

Those from outside the church who are made enthusiasts are
also added to the church, and make more enthusiasts – the feedback effect. In
addition, enthusiasts convert others who, although added to the church, are not
enthusiasts themselves, converting no one. This latter mechanism has no
feedback loop. The feedback of figure 2 is weaker than that of figure 1,
however it is the mechanism seen in revival, evangelistic campaigns and courses
such as Alpha, and can result in considerable exponential growth in the church.

Balancing Feedback

Balancing feedback is the process where the effect of an
action attempts to restrain rather than reinforce the action.For example when a population is
declining through deaths, the more deaths, the less people in the population,
thus deaths are reduced. The result is the exponentialdecay of the population, decline that
slows down [3].

Limited Enthusiasm

There is good evidence that enthusiasts do not remain so
indefinitely. Some run out of people to invite to church, others get taken up
with other aspects of church life and forget evangelism. John Wesley complained
that his converts went on to become much better people as a result of the Holy
Spirit in their lives, so good they became prosperous, and lost their zeal for
religion! This is often called Wesley’s law of the decline of pure religion [4],
and can be expressed as balancing feedback:

Fig 3. Balancing
feedback (B2) and enthusiasts

Limited Population Size

Of course converting people and making them enthusiasts does
not occur in a population of an unlimited supply of people. Populations are
finite and as people are made enthusiasts, this pool of unbelievers declines,
and it becomes harder to make enthusiasts. This is balancing feedback on
unbelievers:

Fig 4. Balancing
feedback (B3) and unbelievers

Because unbelievers become enthusiasts, then the effect of
the balancing feedback on unbelievers, slowing its decline, is mirrored in its equal and opposite effect on
enthusiasts, slowing their growth. Feedback loops exert forces on the
population, speeding them up or slowing them down, and this mirroring effect is
the equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion. Some readers may remember that
from high school physics.

Balance of Forces

It follows that the stock of enthusiasts is subject to three
forces from the three feedback loops. The action of the enthusiasts themselves,
R1, accelerates their growth; the
decline of unbelievers, B3, slows the
enthusiasts’ growth, turning growth to accelerating decline; the loss of enthusiasts,
B2, eventually slowing their decline
to zero, figure 5. Growth in enthusiast numbers eventually turns to decline
because the effect of the unbelievers reduces the production of enthusiasts to
a level below their losses.

Fig 5. The effects of
feedback on the growth and decline of enthusiasts (percentage of population)

The effect of enthusiasts’ activity is that the total
church, enthusiasts and inactive Christians, follows S-shaped growth, figure
6.The final level of the church
falls short of the total population. The enthusiasts have burnt out before they
reach all people, just under 40% of the population in this example, the result
of the three competing feedback loops.

Fig 6. Church growth
resulting from feedback (percentage of population)

Other Feedback Loops

Over time people leave the church and people die, both
balancing feedback. However new are born into the population, replenishing the
pool of potential converts, a reinforcing loop. Thus enthusiasts never quite go
to zero and a stable balance of church numbers is possible, despite losses and
deaths. Nevertheless if conversions are not sufficient, both enthusiasts and
church can head for extinction, the situation currently faced by many UK
denominations.

Second Order Feedback

This “limited enthusiasm” model described here works well
for a couple of generations, but over longer periods the effectiveness of
churches in conversion changes for other reasons, usually resulting from “second
order” loops.

All the feedback described above is “first order”, that is,
only one stock is involved in the loop, see figures 1-4.First order feedback means that its
effect on increasing or decreasing a population is immediate, and thus
relatively easy to follow. Not so for second order feedback, which involves two
stocks. Its effects are often delayed and counter intuitive.

To give an example of second order feedback, consider the case of loops R1, figure 2, and B3, figure 4,acting
together, figure 7. Although B3 is first
order on unbelievers as only one
stock is involved, figure 4, the combination is second order on enthusiasts, figure 7. As enthusiasts
increase, more people are taken from unbelievers, thus unbelievers falls, thus
less are made enthusiasts and their numbers eventually slow – a balancing
effect with two stocks. The result, with B2
(figure 3) added, is growth of enthusiasts changing to decline, figure 5, a
type of behaviour that cannot occur in a stock that only has first order
feedback.

Fig 7. Combining
feedback loops B3 and R1 is a “second order” effect.

Jay Forrester, the founder of system dynamics, suggested
that our “life and mental processes have been conditioned almost exclusively by
first order negative feedback loops” [5].By contrast second order feedback takes us by surprise and we tend not
to respond to it effectively. This is so true for church growth and decline –
but that is the next blog!